Los Angeles Magazine: Hail to the chief. . - Jazz Lit - Lester Leaps In: The Life and Times of Lest

JAZZ LEGEND LESTER YOUNG reported to the draft board in 1944 carrying a tenor saxophone case and a bottle of liquor. After four months in the army, an examining doctor described the musician as being in a "constitutional psychopathic state manifested by drug addiction, chronic alcoholism, and nomadism." At his court-martial, the 35-year-old Young testified that he thought about smoking dope all the time. He was sentenced to one year's hard labor.

For a generation of critics Young's stint in the military marked the moment when Count Basie's most famous soloist, the man who dethroned reigning tenor king Coleman Hawkins in a controversial 1934 "cutting contest" in Kansas City, began to lose both his musical chops and his will to play. In Lester Leaps In: The Life and Times of Lester "Pres" Young (Beacon, 524 pages, $30) UC Santa Barbara professor Douglas Henry Daniels disputes this notion, arguing that Young's supposed artistic demise was a sham promoted by writers resistant to his new musical directions and hostile to the rowdiness and "race mixing" of his postwar audiences.

While Daniels acknowledges the indignities of life on the road -- the roach-filled motels, the grand clubs where Young could enter as a hired act but not as a patron -- Lester is a celebration of the man's career and life. Fellow band members were fiercely loyal, and few leaders were more generous and democratic (in a time of jazz kings, queens, and counts, he was simply "Pres," short for "President of the Tenor Saxophone"). Of course there was a downside to being one of his era's most envied and emulated musicians: Critics blasted his off nights, while white saxophonists who lifted his style received twice his salary. "They are taking me," Young said in his later years, "and I'm not even dead yet."

THREE YEARS AGO Charles Fleming wrote an article for Los Angeles about the Moulin Rouge, the integrated Las Vegas casino that opened -- and closed -- in 1955. The club serves as inspiration and backdrop for The Ivory Coast (Minotaur, 416 pages, $24.95), Fleming's debut novel about the turf war that explodes when ex-boxer "Worthless" Worthington Jones attempts to open the town's first all-black gaming house. It's equal parts sex, gin, gore, and blackjack -- as any fine Vegas thriller should be -- and Fleming clearly relishes having his way with a story already mired in conflicting accounts and conspiracy theories. Names have been changed to protect the rummies and mobsters who once inhabited the pre-Disneyfied Strip, which frees the writer to bust kneecaps and slander aging celebs without being shackled by historical concerns.